The Debate over Design in the Early Church Eerily Current

Intelligent Design the Future

Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture

Philosophy, Society & Culture, Astronomy, Life Sciences, Science

4.3 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 14 September 2022

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In today’s ID the Future, scholar John West, managing director of Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, reveals how current debates over whether nature displays evidence of intelligent design echo debates in the first centuries of the Christian church. The early Christians debated the Greco-Roman materialists but also the religious Gnostics of their day; and the ideas the early Christians confronted then confront Christians and other theists still today. Moreover, in some cases, those ideas are being peddled not by outsiders to the faith but by prominent Christians. West’s talk was taped at the 2022 Westminster Conference on Science and Faith in the greater Philadelphia area, an event jointly sponsored by Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture and Read More ›

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0:00.0	ID the future
0:05.0	future a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
0:12.0	Hello I'm Tom Gilson. It may come as a surprise to some people, but debates
0:17.8	over intelligent design aren't just between people who believe in God and
0:22.4	people who don't.
0:24.0	And some might also be surprised to find out these debates have been going on a lot longer
0:28.8	than they thought, centuries longer actually. Well today on ID the future, John West takes us back to the earliest days of Christianity
0:38.0	as he speaks on the debate over design in the early church.
0:43.0	Dr. West is the vice president of the Discovery Institute and Managing Director
0:48.5	of the Center for Science and Culture there.
0:51.2	He gave this presentation at the August 2022 Westminster Conference
0:56.4	on Science and Theology.
1:01.1	It turns out that this isn't the first time Christians have had to confront a culture where
1:06.7	belief in intelligent design generated lots of pushback.
1:11.0	In the early centuries of the Christian Church, Christians faced eerily similar debates about intelligent design in nature.
1:17.0	Opposition to the design of nature by God came from two main groups.
1:22.0	The first were the Greco-Roman materialists. They were the Richard Dawkins
1:26.2	of their day.
1:27.0	Believing that the world is intelligently designed can get you into trouble.
1:38.0	But believing that nature actually supplies evidence that it was intelligently designed is, that's even worse.
1:48.0	As long as you believe in intelligent design is just a matter of your personal faith, you might be tolerated.
1:54.9	After all, lots of people believe strange things in private.
	...

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